About Studio 397

Posts by Studio 397 :

It’s safe to say we are ecstatic about this release! Our very first mixed class pack of GTEs and LMPs! It’s been a wild journey, and all the teams involved have been going non-stop to bring these cars to life – we think the results will show on track as you cruise around in a field of color and lights! We proudly announce some of the most relevant and iconic brands and cars, combing them into a unique pack. Welcome to the ‘Endurance Pack’ for rFactor 2! Featuring the Porsche 911 RSR, BMW M8 GTE, Corvette C7.R, Oreca 07 LMP2 and the Norma M30 LMP3. With stunning physics and new features, the pack taps into the heart of rFactor 2’s endurance capabilities. We are also happy to have liveries from various different teams racing these cars, and we would like to thank them all for that!

Introducing the cars

Our goal with this pack was certainly to offer a wide variety of cars in different classes used in various modern endurance racing series. We ended up picking five widely used cars in three different classes, complementing our earlier GT3 pack. We deliberately did not include an LMP1 car as that class is currently undergoing a transformation, and we feel strongly about providing you with cars that are up to date and future proof. Once the dust settles on the current “super season” we will certainly look at the new cars that emerge! With that said, back to our amazing cars…

Oreca 07 LMP2

The fastest class in this pack is the LMP2 class, and the Oreca 07 is certainly a popular weapon of choice for teams. It combines daring engineering and skillful know-how. The car debuted late 2006 and competed for the first time in the opening round of the 2017 IMSA season. In its first season it was the winner of the WEC 2017 P2 class and of Le Mans 2017; it is used by several of the leading endurance teams in the world. During various stages we have had feedback from Duqueine Engineering, Dragonspeed and Jacky Chan Racing, and their input was invaluable to making this car.

Norma M30 LMP3

The Norma M30 LMP3 had a development cycle of 18 months with innovation at its heart. It was homologated to LMP3. The M30 boasts maximum efficiency, optimised performance, which lead it to instantly becoming a strong contender, winning various races in the series it entered in. Cars in this class offer a pure driving experience. Neither anti-lock brakes nor traction control are allowed, and the downforce on these cars combined with the available engine power makes them challenging and rewarding to drive. During the development of this car we collaborated closely with the team at Duqueine Engineering, who raced this car in ELMS and kindly helped us with many aspects of the car’s simulation.

Porsche 911 RSR

Another iconic car from Porsche, the 911 RSR combines technology and history to create another classic sports car. The car is used in endurance in the GTE class all over the world. Porsche successfully adapted the classic 911 design to make this a mid-engine design, optimizing balance and performance. We are very grateful for the support we got from Porsche in developing this car. It is the very latest spec of this car.

Corvette C7.R

The Chevrolet Corvette C7.R, built by Pratt & Miller and Chevrolet for competition in endurance racing, has had numerous successes throughout the years, including a famous photo-finish at the 2016 Rolex 24h of Daytona. Corvette won its class at Le Mans eight times and won 107 out of the 202 events they competed in. Our version is the latest spec car, with updated diffuser and rear wing, and it is of course the successor to the highly successful C6.R we already have in our simulation.

BMW M8 GTE

The BMW M8 GTE competes in multiple endurance series, combining cutting-edge technology with sheer beauty to create a car that will set new benchmarks in endurance racing. We are extremely proud to be the first racing simulation to feature this car after seeing the car in action at Spa earlier this year and being able to talk to the team and drivers there.

New features

In-car traction control

rFactor 2 already featured “driving aids” that provided both traction control and anti-lock brakes, but like all driving aids they are global for all cars in a session. Especially in multi-class racing, and this pack is a good example, it is common to have different classes that might or might not have traction control available. Therefore we decided to add the option for specific cars to feature traction control (and anti-lock brakes) as part of the car, completely separate from any “aids” settings. On top of that, we can configure the exact number of “levels” the real cars have and decide if you can adjust those levels in-car or just in the garage as part of your setup, and even if you can turn it off or not, as some cars have such aids built-in and you can’t even disable them.

For this pack, traction control is available only on the LMP2 and GTE cars, and there are a couple of things you need to know to set it up. First of all, as this is a system that is separate from the driving aids, to make in-car adjustments you need to go to your controller settings and map the following four new keys:

On top of that, you can also configure these settings in the garage setup:

As a final note, if you also have driving aids enabled for one of these cars, the effects of both will correctly be combined. For example, if you set traction control to 2 (which is fairly low) in the in-car setting and then turn on the driving aid to “Medium”, the end result will be that you have medium traction control. We expect most servers and people to simply disable those aids for official races though.

Position lights

This pack is not just about content, we also took the opportunity to add some new tech to add to the immersion of multi-class racing. The all new ‘position lights’ on all cars in the this pack will not only show your individual position, they will also show your position in class with color coding. On top of that, the lights turn into a pit stop timer ‘counting up’ when you pit!

The road ahead

New cars and features always trigger the question “what about the existing cars”? Our close collaboration with teams and manufacturers have given us even more detailed insight into the tyres that they are running on these cars. On top of that, our laser scanned version of Sebring gave us an excellent opportunity to compare data to a 100% accurate track. The data prompted us to make some updates to our model, and since the GT3 cars are using the same tyres, our next step will be to go back to and implement and test the tyres on those cars too, which in general will make them a bit slower.

The same applies to the position lights as well as the in-car traction control and anti-lock brakes, which will be added as features to each individual GT3 car. We don’t have an exact ETA for these changes yet, as we also need to make sure these changes don’t affect the BOP within the class, but we will certainly keep you up to date in our monthly roadmap. We will also add documentation to our website for third parties that wish to implement these new features on their cars, as well as publish example tyres.

That’s all for now, we wish you all a great weekend from everybody within Studio 397! Enjoy the race!

Over the course of this month we have released a few hotfixes for our fresh 1110 build whilst our team has been working on many of the features we’ve been talking about in the last few roadmaps. We also went to Zandvoort during the Jumbo Racing Days to showcase some of our content to the huge crowds that came to see several racing series and of course appearances from Max Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo and David Coulthard.

Needless to say, we have plenty to talk about this month, and the first announcement we have is a new hire that starts tomorrow. Now we don’t always announce people that we add to the team and, as a reference, our total team in Studio 397 is about 30 people, currently. With our focus on building the competition infrastructure and releasing that later this year, we welcome René Buttler to the team. He has been working at ESL on projects and esports tournaments with a strong focus on racing simulations, and we are very happy to have him at Studio 397!

Content

Last month we already announced that our next pack would consist of 5 cars. This will be our “Endurance Pack,” and we are ready to announce one of the two previously unannounced GTE cars that will be part of it. All cars are in the final stages of approval by the manufacturers, which is a process we don’t have full control over, but it does indicate we’re getting close to a release now. That said, it is time to announce the Porsche 911 RSR GTE! Ever since the start of Studio 397 we have had a great relationship with Porsche, so we’re very happy to finally be able to share the news. We’ve licensed the very latest spec of this car to race alongside the other GTE’s, and we are confident this car will be a joy to drive. And it certainly looks great!

Earlier this week, we also visited the offices and test track of Duqueine Engineering again and validated both the Oreca 07 and Norma M30 models in their simulator with their drivers and engineers. We are also including liveries of various teams racing these cars to ensure we end up with a great looking field of cars, as you can see from the shots below.

That’s of course not all the content we’re working on. There are a several more things under construction.

The March and Brabham cars are close to completion now. We’re adding the final rain and damage effects and doing the driver animations. Physics wise we’re very happy. Each car has it’s own distinctive character, yet they are very competitive. The McLaren is still in the middle of production, so it’s expected to come a bit later.

Those of you who visited us at Zandvoort have seen the progress we made on that track. It’s still not quite finished, but it’s looking better, and we addressed the performance issues that people reported, so we’re in good shape.

For Botniaring, all 3D work is done, and we’re currently working on texturing and optimization. That work and the AI lines will be finished this month. Then we are going to be giving the track its final shakedown before releasing it.

For Sebring we are currently in the middle of adding all the track side objects. As you might know, building a track can be roughly split in two phases. In the first phase we’re building the roads and everything “up to the barriers,” and in the second phase we do everything beyond the barriers and things like AI lines, night lighting and various other details. We’d like to share our current progress with you, bearing in mind that not everything you see here has been properly optimized yet, so “things might change”.

UI

UI testing and tweaking is still ongoing, and we’re starting to integrate the work on the competition infrastructure into the new UI whilst also making the back-end more robust. Another thing we have started working on is the integration of Motec data logging into the core of the simulation.

Competition

First of all, congratulations to Oli Ellis-Richardson for winning the KartSim hotlap competition! Oli has secured an entry to the SuperOne British eSport Championship and a copy of the KartSim Pro package. In the USF2000 challenge the winner of last years World Fastest Gamer showed that he was still one of the fastest simracers out there: with a 47.443, Rudy van Buren took pole position.

Results:

Rudy van Buren

Joonas Raivio

Jakub Charkot

Robin Pansar

Kevin van Dooren

All of them have won a free pick of any rFactor 2 DLC pack, on top of that Rudy also won €100.

Community

This month we released the much anticipated performance upgrades. Judging from the feedback we got, build 1110 has provided most, if not all people a significant improvement. On top of those improvements, we also added several new features, one of which was a refinement of our tyre model, which Michael explained extensively in his blog. In the last couple of weeks we’ve been monitoring our forums and other channels to resolve any remaining issues. As promised, we also intend to address some remaining issues with our rainy conditions. In VR the performance is still relatively low, and viewed from external TV cameras the raindrops, when zoomed in, look too big. Both issues are still on our list for a future update.

We also took part in the Luminis DevCon, a yearly conference that we organize in a big movie theater by developers for developers. Studio 397 was there, and we brought two rigs for people to try rFactor 2. One of them was a prototype of a new monocoque by Bernax that was setup to use VR, the other our office rig with triple screens. As a special guest we had Rudy van Buren, McLaren’s World’s Fastest Gamer, join us for the keynote and answering questions and giving advice all day, and Marcel gave a talk about the future of simracing.

Norma M30 LMP3

Two months ago we announced we had licensed the Norma M30 LMP3 car. Working closely with both Norma and one of the first team to race this car, Duqueine Engineering, we are now in the final stage of production for this car, testing the car on different virtual tracks and comparing its performance with the telemetry and other data we gathered. This car will be one of five in our next car pack, joining the Corvette C7.R and the Oreca 07 LMP2, with two more, yet unannounced GTE cars to come. In fact all five cars are actually in the final stage so pending final approval from the different manufacturers we are getting close to a release.

Actually, the whole LMP3 class is fairly new, being launched by ACO in 2015, when five constructors were selected to build the chassis with Nissan providing a 420hp engine to power all of them. Norma introduced their car, the M30, in February of 2017, and since the car has been used by a growing number of teams and winning quite a few races they entered in. At Studio 397 we met the guys from Duqueine Engineering in one of their first races with the car at Spa during the ELMS race, and this is where we started to examine the possibility of bringing this car to rFactor 2.

UI and Competition

On the topic of UI and Competition we are still working hard to finish both, and at this point we really don’t have much more to say other than that both are being tested internally. Some of the things that are currently being tested are the localisation of the interface, which we are basing on open standards to ensure that it will be easy for translators to provide a new version in their own language by leveraging existing tools. On the competition side we are now testing sequences of different types of sessions, ensuring our servers can transition from one to the other and have the results of one session (such as a qualification result) influence the next session (the grid for the start of a race).

Historics

Last week we already showed you the latest screenshots for the March 761, the first car to accompany the Brabham BT44B which has been in development for quite some time and also served as the main character in a whole series of blogs that explain all intricate details of the rFactor 2 physics engine. What we did not say is that we are not stopping there. After these two cars are released, we are going to add another, and we are very proud to announce that this will be the McLaren M23. This car is the one James Hunt drove in and won the championship with in 1976, beating Niki Lauda by just one point! We certainly hope that these cars will please the many fans of historic racing we have!

That concludes this month, and its roadmap. We have a lot of things in motion at the moment and we’re pushing hard to finish those things so we can share them with you as, believe it or not, we are as impatient as you to start driving! Have a great month!

It’s live! In the last couple of roadmap updates, we’ve made it no secret that we have been working hard on a set of performance upgrades. We’ve taken our time to get it right and took advantage of the DirectX 11 API as much as possible. Our focus was on performance, while keeping the actual look of the game the same. All of this centers around a concept called “frame time”, which is the time it takes to completely render a single frame to your screen(s). Obviously we want that time to be as low as possible, but we also want it to be as constant as possible as only the combination of both leads to a smooth display. In general there are three things that influence this: your video card (GPU), the processor you have (CPU) and the bus between them and their memory. Optimizing performance means looking at all three, and we’ll go into more detail on how we did that below.

To update your install to this latest version you only need to make sure that you’re opted-out of any beta versions you might have been using before. This build also has a new multiplayer version (1.1110) which means we updated the dedicated server. Depending on how you installed that one, you might have to explicitly update it.

Graphics Performance Improvements

Thanks to DX11, we are now able to take advantage of multiple graphics threads and leverage the modern CPUs to render the scene faster. Internally we had to make quite a lot of changes to the code to make this possible and really take advantage. One area where we got a significant improvement is in our shadow rendering. Using multiple threads speeds that up, and another thing we did was to no longer render the shadows separately for each screen, which means in multiview (three screens) and VR (two screens) we are doing less work. There are also a couple of high-level optimizations we have done to very specific systems. This includes our handling of spotlights and brake disk glow, but also the way real road updates. All these systems were re-written to be more efficient from a CPU and GPU point of view. On top of that, we addressed the traffic on the bus between the CPU and GPU, minimizing and optimizing it to have a more consistent frame time, which leads to significantly less stuttering, especially on systems where this was the bottleneck in the whole pipeline. Our final optimization was of our most used and time critical shaders. We’ve optimized those to be less expensive to the GPU.

As you can probably see by now, there are quite a lot of things that changed, and one question we have not answered is how much all of these changes combined influence performance? The answer is, it depends, which is why we’re not making any claims in terms of numbers, but invite you to give it a try on your own system. We are confident that you will see an improvement, both in terms of consistency in the framerate, meaning less stutters and in terms of an overall improvement.

Change Log

On top of these, we took the opportunity to add a few other improvements and bugfixes in several areas of the simulation. We are listing those here.

New HUD

Released the newly designed HUD, optimized for Full HD screens and anything else with that aspect ratio, and made it the default. We have removed our old HUD designs from the install.

The “deltabest” indication gets reset at the start of a session only, instead of every time you get in the car. We also make sure to only show it when you’re on a valid lap.

Ensured that the Low Speed Indicator (LSI) is still transparent.

AI

Fixed an issue with the AI throttle and brake application, which would cause poor accelleration at very low AI strengths.

Sound

Changed the way opponent volume works. If you set them to 100% in the past, they were way too loud. If you turned them down, they would not be as loud as the player car in external cameras. We introduced a damping factor now for the cockpit that can be configured per car and defaults to 0.3 that solves this issue.

The number of engine samples was increased to 12 and the number of transmission samples to 6 to allow much richer sounds for both.

Inputs

Changed the way in which we combine primary and alternate inputs for the throttle, brake and steering to end up with more consistent behaviour for both.

When using keyboard rates for analog, typically used with game controllers, we apply a lot of smoothing which initially results in a fast response, but eventually responds very slowly, making a car hard to control. We’ve designed a new algorithm that works a lot better and is more linear.

Development Corner

We have added some new 64 bit compatible 3D Studio Max 2012 plugins. They are still in “beta” but have been used at Studio 397 for some time now. These should help anyone working on larger scenes. Please note that, in order to improve stability, we strongly recommend updating Max to Service Pack 2.

As we no longer support Max 2010 and 2011, those plugins have now been removed.

We have removed gJED, as we feel the tool in its current state did not meet our quality standards.

The plugin API has been enhanced and bumped to version 8, with improved application life cycle support. This brings back some of the data we had to remove because it was mixed with DirectX 9 information that we could no longer support. We also added the deltabest time for all cars. The new package and documentation for it will be released on our site soon after this release.

Bugfixes

Fixed the join/leave/join messages and unnecessary reloading of a car when you joined a server with car upgrades selected.

Fixed a bug in our SteamPlugin which accidentally returned the wrong API version, causing the game to try to invoke it wrongly and crash.

Fixed viewer crash on startup.

Fixed the very dark areas on the car in the showroom, which was caused by us not correctly setting up ambient light.

Fixed black screen that some people got when starting the physics (ptool) and tyre (ttool) tools.

Removed a redundant log file from the Steam distribution as it would cause a verify ever on every check.

Fixed two issues with the 32 bits version that crashed in specific circumstances.

Displaying the performance info now works on VR as well.

Wrapping it up

We obviously hope you will enjoy this new build, and before we wrap up this article, there are a few closing words we would like to add. In the introduction we already stated that our focus now was on performance and with that out of the way we still have a few other areas to look at. In the graphics department we are looking at some improvements on how our rain effects look on external cameras, as well as fixing an issue that specifically affects VR in rainy conditions. We’ll elaborate a bit more on this in our monthly roadmaps. In the mean time, have a great weekend!

And work goes on!… We continue to relentlessly hammer away at the new features and content mentioned in the previous roadmaps. And yes, you’ll be happy to know that this month is no exception: we will still manage to bring you some ‘new’ things to look forward to.

We know how much you all enjoy these road maps, with anticipation of the things to come, and we are just as anxious to share them with you. Keeping you informed of our broad development goals is part of our whole outlook. For us communication is key to making sure we stay on the mark and never get out ahead of our userbase. So as things begin to take shape and features mature, we do our best to show you the progression and previews as soon as we possibly can. Although these are not ‘deadlines’, they should give a you good idea of the things you need to get excited about.

Performance

The graphics optimizations we mentioned in previous roadmaps are still very much ongoing and current. We are investing a considerable amount of resources to get this done. Graphical improvements and optimizations are key to future proofing the rFactor 2 graphics engine. With that in mind, we are taking our time to methodically test each optimization pass to make sure everything stays put and is in working order, and that is why it’s taking a little longer than originally planned. Thanks to our very focused group of dedicated testers who are looking at each area, we are moving forward at a steady pace. We hope to get it out to you ASAP!

VR

And speaking of specifics, VR is one area where we know we need to improve performance, and these optimizations are showing very promising increases in stability and overall framerate.

Triple Screen – Multiview

“Multiview” has to render three separate viewpoints and because of this, it’s inherently more taxing on any system. You’ll be happy to know we have worked on some very specific optimizations that will positively affect multiview performance

Content

After releasing the KartSim pack earlier this week, we wanted to reassure you that we also have new free content coming up:

March 761

We have a solid commitment to historic racing and we hope you find rFactor 2 a good place to experience some of the great cars of the past. With that we are pleased to announce that we will be releasing the March 761 soon for free. Not just that, we have also updated the Brabham BT44 for some excellent head-to-head racing.

Botniaring

Finnish fans! We have a new track on the horizon. Introducing the Botniaring, located in Southern Ostrobothnia, Jurva, Finland aka Perkeleville (big grin) The track is perfect for our upcoming Tatuus cars as well as many others.

Zandvoort

We have a number of updates to the Zandvoort track that is currently in beta. While we were building the track, it was being repaved and our 0.20 version showed a version of the track as it was then: about three quarters done, with some old asphalt in the final sector. Since then, repaving has been finished and the Audi S curve was remodeled for the DTM races. On top of that we added a lot of detail, for example in the pit area, and at the same time optimized the track. We’re almost ready to put the track through final testing, so we hope to bring you this new version soon!

Oreca 07 LMP2

After all these free updates above, we are also proud to announce another car that will be part of a new upcoming pack – say hi to the super successful Oreca 07 LMP2! Used across all major endurance series the Oreca LMP2 almost won outright at Le Mans last year with Jackie Chan Racing DC.

UI

Most of our focus on the UI in the last months has been to include all of the current base features and test them to make sure they function properly. On the surface this might seem like an easy task, but it involves a lot of repeated clicking and trying: the UI is a complex matrix of interdependences that we need to carefully unravel to better understand and improve. So before really jumping in to conquer the new features, we needed a solid base.

As this first phase begins to wrap up and we have a stable functioning UI, our focus is shifting to those specific things that really need to be more user friendly, existing features that were either hidden or not readily visible enough to find and use. Two current examples of this are custom teams/skins and driver swaps.

Using custom skins in the current UI, although functional, has always been a bit obtuse and not straight forward for the average user. We saw a couple of ways to improve this going forward. One is to offer a simpler way to get your skin in game, and avoid the need to alt-tab or even exit rFactor 2, just to see your skin on the car. We’re still playing with a few ways to make this less fiddly. Next, custom ‘team’ creation needs to be more direct and easier to achieve. This involves thinking like a new user and making smart dialogs and using correct terminology, that way there’s no doubts about how naming or hierarchy.

Driver swaps are another area that works in the current UI, but is complicated to use in practice: having to close rF2 and navigate through somewhat hidden menus is not ideal and prone to user error, and having to assign keys to perform simple actions is a bit overkill. So the new way to do a driver swap is simple. When you join a server, we will ask you if you want to drive a car or join as as a spectator. When you choose the latter and click drive, you’ll get a pop up list of names to choose from, click select and you’re ready to drive once your team mate pits – simple as that!

Competition

The competition structure continues to take shape, and just like the UI we are focusing on the ground work. This means dealing with and squishing any bugs related to the day to day functioning of the competition structure itself. Competitions, as you may know, can span many weeks with multiple events and sessions. It’s therefore important that each code change is throughly tested for reliability and stability. By basing this on the cloud technology of our parent company Luminis we ensure the system will be very scalable, and it is certainly our intention to end up with an open system that can also be used by the many existing leagues out there.

We hope to show you more real soon!

Community

When we did the paint competition a few months ago, we were overwhelmed by the large amount of high quality entries. Encouraged by this, we concluded we wanted to do more of these competitions to showcase the many talented painters in our community. That said, assembling all these skins into packs proved to be a lot of work, so after discussing various options we decided to build some automation to more easily generate new cars, their skins, and all data and preview images associated with them. That is the reason the GT3 skins took us longer, but we’re confident we can release them next week. To give you a preview of all the nice skins you will see, we included a “spotter guide” like overview for you to enjoy!

Here it is, all new content from KartSim! KartSim is one of our close partners, and we are proud to introduce you to an all new driving experience in rFactor 2, created entirely by KartSim’s own dedicated team of developers. KartSim is a project created by Tony Irfan, a true insider in the world of karting. KartSim specialises in providing high-end leading-edge hardware, rigs and simulation software to the international karting industry.

It’s been a while in the making, but real Karting in rFactor 2 has arrived! As you’ll see below, many great names current and past started in Karting. This is only the first in a series of Karts and tracks yet to be released by the KartSim team. There’s more to come!

Tracks

Buckmore Park Kart Circuit is an MSA approved outdoor kart racing circuit located just off the M2 in Chatham, Kent, England.

Originally owned by John Surtees, who notably won world Grand Prix championships in both Formula One car racing and Grand Prix motorcycle racing. Situated in a woodland between the two motorways, its proximity to London makes it Britain’s busiest circuit.

Buckmore Park is a circuit where many current and past Formula One drivers learned their trade, including Johnny Herbert and F1 champions Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton, who was originally discovered by Ron Dennis in the 1996 Champions of the Future event held at Buckmore Park.

With a length of 1.6 km, this karting circuit is one of the largest in the UK. Situated on the A5 between Corwen and Betws-Y-Coed, is one of the UK premier karting venues that started life comparatively late to other S1 race venues. With fast, sweeping uphill and downhill sections combine to make this an extremely fun yet technical challenge. It is no wonder all the young Racing Professionals start their career at GYG Karting.

A lap around the track takes you through corners as carousel, compression corner, the druid’s complex and the devils elbow and contains a straight named after the Snowdon Mountain. The track has various good overtaking opportunities, guaranteeing exciting races!

PFI is the UK’s largest outdoor karting circuit based in Grantham, Lincolnshire and caters for various corporate events and race meetings throughout Lincolnshire, Newark, Nottingham and the UK. British, European and World Championships are held at PFI, as well as a club race held once a month by Trent Valley Kart Club who are based at the track. The circuit was built by Paul Fletcher, who still owns it today. Recently in 2011 an extension was added on to the track including a bridge, making it one of a kind.

Karts

There are two karts within the KartSim package, the Iame Senior X30 UK and a Rental Kart, the karts have been meticulously designed working with partners on physics and drivers for performance and accuracy. These karts are fixed setup, which means they will be great to race online.

Iame Senior X30 UK

The “X30 World” concept is based on the engine X30 125cc and it can be summarized in few words as “real Karting at hand”. Thanks to the characteristics of the engine of simplicity, immediate feeling, reliability, performance and ease of use, with the concept of X30 World, IAME offers a full program for Karting drivers from the year of their 13th birthday (with the correct MSA licence) with an engine that can virtually accompany them along the whole career.

Since the very first introduction on the markets, the X30 has quickly and constantly grown, in the beginning as an engine dedicated to regional series, up to commercial classes promoted under the name of “X30 Challenge”, then introduced as Federative class by federations willing to replace the unsuccessful international classes and recently landed at international level with a European Challenge and an International Final usually held in central Europe.

The success of the X30 categories, basically distinguished in X30 Junior, X30 Senior and X30 Master, comes from the stability and solidity of the engine and from IAME’s constant aim to provide detailed regulations and low management costs of both the vehicle and the race meetings. In 2013 the X30 is present in more than 15 countries and beside the commercial classes.

Rental Kart

The Rental Kart is a fixed gearing corporate kart using a 4 stroke engine for karters who enjoy karting as hobby. They’re equipped with night lights too so you can keep racing them 24/7!

Welcome to the January 2018 roadmap. We’re really excited about what this year will bring. Our internal roadmap has been setup and it features lots of cool content, updates and technical improvements. So let’s get started!

Welcome to rFactor 2 trailer

First of all, we have a brand new trailer for rFactor 2. We hope you like it!

Performance

We’ve had a lot of feedback from some of our users about the graphics performance of the simulation. Over the last months we have improved the fidelity of the DX11 graphics a lot, but partially due to the fact that we still had to support the DX9 engine for every update, we did not yet take full advantage of some of the things DX11 could do. When investigating some of the reports we got, we decided it was time to start making some fundamental improvements to the engine. We are still working on that, but internal builds are looking promising, so we hope to have more news about that soon.

Content

With the release of our GT3 Power Pack and our Formula E Energize Pack last year we are looking forward to bringing you great car and track content this year. With that we are pleased to announce that we have signed a license with Portland International Raceway which will be released for free later this year and ahead of the labor day race. The track has an incredible history having been developed out of the remnants of the City of Vanport. At 1.97 miles, the track has hosted several senior racing events most notably Champ Car and Indycar with the lap record by the late Justin Wilson of 57.597.

We are also working at completing the promised update to the Zandvoort track, adding the latest resurfacing changes as well as a change to one of the turns that was done before the last DTM race. Our expectation is to have that done somewhere towards the end of the first quarter and we will keep you informed about its progress.

HUD

Our updated HUD is currently in final testing and will be added in the next code update we are going to release. Last month we already talked a bit about some of the new data we’ve made available, and this is probably a good time to talk a bit about the new HUD design. As we already said it is still based on our existing technology, but we’ve redesigned it from scratch to look more modern. This means we designed it for the screen resolution that is currently used, and updated the font to conform to our new styling. We have tried to go for a HUD that features all the data, but with the least possible duplication. The most important things remain on screen all the time, some lesser needed data is available in the different pages of the multi-function display (MFD). On top of that we have tried to ensure that the data we display is accurate enough for people to use when driving. Some hightlights include the new “deltabest” bar and digital display at the top, as well as the fuel left and fuel used on the last lap indications at the bottom of the screen. The screenshot is still a work in progress, so some details might still change, but this will give you an impression on what we’re testing now.

KartSim

In a couple of weeks from now, KartSim will release a consumer version of their content on Steam. All of it will run inside rFactor 2 and can be mixed and matched with our other content. The majority of that content will be paid, however they are also looking at doing a free indoor track. KartSim will include the x30 kart models and three laser (Lidar) scanned kart tracks: Paul Fletcher International Circuit, Buckmore Park International Circuit and Glan Y Gors Championship Circuit. This pack will be around 20 euros. There will also be a version geared to the professional karting market (KartSim Pro) which includes more tracks and karts and includes and entry into the British eSports Karting Championship. It will cost 395 UK Pounds plus VAT and will only be available via KartSim.

Third Party Support

As we have spoken about in the past, we are ready to support third parties that wish to publish items via our store with the official licenses and agreements in place. Please do contact us via Discord or start a conversation with us on the forum for more information.

Laser Scanning

Finally, we are proud to announce that a few days ago we have successfully scanned our first track with professional LIDAR equipment. We’ll keep you guys in suspense a little bit longer about which track this will be, but needless to say we are very excited to work with such data to produce a very accurate rendition of this track.

If you want to check if your computer hardware is suitable for Windows Mixed Reality, you can check out the guide that Microsoft posted. Alternatively the Microsoft Store features a free application that you can run on your computer to check if it meets the criteria. A thing to note is that you don’t need Bluetooth 4.0 or controllers for simracing. Just the headset is enough.

Once you’ve established that your computer is suitable and you’ve ordered and received your headset, you need to take the following steps to make it work in rFactor 2:

Plug in your headset to establish that it’s setup and working correctly in Windows.

Last month we reflected on 2017 and hinted at new content. Earlier this week we announced the Formula E Energize Pack, bringing electric racing to rFactor 2. This weekend you can all watch the season opening double header race in Hong Kong. We announced a hotlap competition, which gives you a chance to win some exclusive Formula E goodies, or show your friends how much better you are than them!

Some of you might have watched the talk and drive that Marcel did on RaceDepartment. For those of you that didn’t, you missed out on some free copies of the Formula E pack. We’ll summarize some of the new things that were discussed there.

Obviously a lot of questions centered around the Formula E content. We’ll release an update of that in a week or two that will include the new team liveries that we were not able to show you ahead of the opening race, and we’ll also provide a code update that will give you a better insight into the amount of battery you have left, and are using per lap. Since this part of the strategy is such an integral part of racing these cars, we feel an improvement is in order so you don’t have to rely on third party plugins. Incidentally, talking about third party plugins, Crew Chief already released a code update that supports Formula E. If you have not checked it out yet, we can definitely recommend you do so!

We’re also ready to announce that we will be making DX11 the default before Christmas. As an intermediate step before we come with a new HUD system for plugins, we’ll focus on providing a default HUD that includes a lot of the features you have been enjoying in third party plugins. One of these is a new dial that show you the time delta compared to your best lap, but we have a few other new things and enhancements planned. Part of this DX11 update will be the inclusion of the “rain update” that we previewed at SimExpo. We’ve since perfected it. We’ve also improved the ambient lighting, producing subtle differences that give the overall image a slightly more dramatic look. At the moment we are working feverishly to update all our cars and tracks to make maximum use of these new features. We’ll incrementally release those updates, but anticipate to already have a substantial part done before the end of this year. The shots below are still work in progress, but show you what we’ve been doing to make the rain look better on both cars and tracks.

Another announcement is that we officially support all the new Windows Mixed Reality headsets, check it here. In 2018 we will focus on more DX11 related updates, both in terms of performance and fidelity. As announced, that means we’re deprecating DX9, meaning it will still be available, but it won’t be updated anymore. This gives us more bandwidth to focus on the new engine, which should be a huge benefit for everybody.

Wrapping up this month’s update, we all wish you a happy holiday season and we’ll be back with one final roadmap update close to the end of the year. Of course we will be back in 2018. Happy simracing!

Team Painters! Are you ready!? With the Holiday Season approaching, we are offering you the chance to not only win an awesome Fanatec Clubsport 2.5 base with a Clubsport GT Wheel but to get your awesome liveries into our next build update!

Design your team liveries for any or all the GT3 Pack cars and submit them to us here at paintcomp@studio-397.com by the now extended 18th December 2017. We will be accepting 10 liveries per car into the build with the best overall selected as the winner! By the way, don’t worry, this doesn’t mean we aren’t working hard to bring you more official liveries as well!

A few ground rules:

Please send images of your cars and a dropbox (or similar) working file link to the e-mail above for submission.

Please ensure you have the rights to use the logos displayed on the cars or we will not accept them – with common brand names we will require proof of acceptance.

No profanity, nudity, etc.

You can get the templates from the Template folder in your rFactor 2 installation folder.

Make sure you add the PSD version of your entry alongside the DDS files that can be viewed in-game.